Meta

Immigration

This whole argument coming from the UK government that people in the UK must ‘respect the Brexit decision and democracy’ just annoys me. It completely misunderstands what Brexit is all about.

I saw a video this week of people who support Brexit being interviewed. i was Particularly interested when they were asked why they were supporting Brexit. Their view was that their community was in in decline, shops had closed, wages stagnated, services declining and everything getting more expensive and harder, so to have a meaningful vote on something would be a refreshing bit of democracy, and promote change, to give Brexit, which will solve of the problems in UK society.

The only thing I disagree with them about is Brexit being the answer, there is no logical path from the premises to this conclusion. It looks unlikely that whilst we are remain a country with an outmoded democratic system where the Tories keep getting re-elected on an ever slimmer popular vote. It is Tory governments that have caused the decline of the UK. Leaving the EU won’t alter the decline by itself.

What I passionately agree with these Brexit voters is the need for democracy in the UK and to ‘take back control’. Leaving the Tories negotiate Brexit entirely missed the whole point of Brexit, which was for more democracy.

What I mean by democracy is simply government that represents the people governed. The UK parliamentary system of representative democracy is based on sound principles. Every area of the UK elects a politician to represent them in Westminster, then the elected politicians get on with the job of making decisions to continually improve the functioning of the UK economy and solve problems as they arise. The politicians job is threefold, firstly to listen to a full range of arguments and positions, their constituents, business leaders, trade unions, academics, economists, lawyers, anyone with a view essentially. A Policy is then produced which the politicians scrutinise, debate, amend and eventually vote on, to ensure there is a broad consensus that that policy is the right thing to do. To be a good politician you need to be a good listener and a good decision maker.

The modern politician isn’t selected to have these qualities though. The modern politician is skilled in climbing the ‘greasy pole’ of the competitive career ladder in a major political party. Along the way they acquire the skills of effective electioneering to win power. This means that the is no incentive to develop the skills of arguing for something, listening or rigorously analysing an issue, these are not the valued traits. Instead the modern politician skilfully avoids saying anything noteworthy, for fear of alienating those who may disagree with what may be a good idea. Indeed, any politician who does open their mouths to argue for a cause is shouted down. It is a sad state of affairs, society is rapidly losing debating skills.

I would argue that is is the failure of the political class and the democratic systems that support them that have failed. We now have a political class who are in cahoots with the capital class, drawing ever more wealth in top their hands and away from the productive economy. The problem with modern capitalism is that there is too much capital. But you can’t solve the problem of capital when the political class also have their noses in the capital trough. Capital no longer invests enough in research or innovation and instead increases their share of the pie by rentiering, or making money from their capital, by renting out their land, rather than using it for anything productive.

If you speak to someone ‘in the street’ in the UK, you will often hear the phrases ‘politicians are all the same’, yet few do anything about it. The problem with the UK economy is too much capital because of the political class and the failure of democracy. It is democracy that needs to rediscover its roots and represent the people again. The tragedy of Brexit is that the EU and Brexit became the scapegoat for the UKs troubles rather than the UK government.

The EU has always had a bad press in the UK. Most of the popular newspapers have regularly run stories blaming and often misreporting the EU for many all sorts of things. However wrapped up in Brexit is this truth of Brexit. The EU is a corrupt, centralising, weakly democratic organisation. It would be beneficial to leave it to obtain a genuine representative democracy. To take back control to a more accountable, more local institution. However this isn’t going to happen just because of the Brexit vote, it will take action within the UK for democracy to rise again, though through Brexit may be how that process is ignited.

My argument has always been for devolution, for bottom up decision making. It is why I support independence for Wales and for stronger local government. Simply because it is more representative of a population and there is less chance of corruption due to smaller organisations and because the politicians have to live in our communities, to speak daily with those they represent. Big states or supra-national organisations need to be accountable to their constituent regions to function well and in accordance with their founding principles, you need to be strong locally before you can help wider society and make any efficiency gains through cooperation.

The counter argument I often hear is ‘Where do you stop, will each village be its own kingdom?’ Of course not, the principle isn’t ever smaller territories, but local accountability and finding the right size population for decision making. Once you reach the optimum size you don’t surpass it!

This reductionism has been very rife in Brexit. Especially so in the big issue of the Brexit debate, immigration. ‘Immigration is bad, we must stop it!, the only way we can do this is Brexit”, the Brexiteers cried, again and again, over endless months. Except immigration is only a proxy for the actual problem. It goes something like this: ” I don’t mind foreigners/ people of other races, but every time I visit the hospital I rarely see a native British doctor or nurse. There are too many immigrants, we should have more British doctors and nurses” I don’t disagree. The problem isn’t “allowing” overseas people to be doctors or nurses in the UK, the problem is not producing enough doctors and nurses natively in the UK economy. Unfortunately that issue has not been tackled by the political class and it’s been around for decades. What you would need to do is invest more in training and then paying the doctors and nurses at an adequate rate to retain their services in the country. But that involves spending money, putting taxes up and the political class knew that to win that next election they needed to prioritise tax cuts and not spending on doctors and nurses. So we got tax cuts they didn’t give us any more money and more immigrant workers. There is no problem with this system, in the medium term, until the population suddenly decides it no longer likes immigrant workers, not realising they have facilitated this by voting in the same career politicians, election after election.

Historically, this was kind of how European society functioned for most of human history, albeit without the democracy. The typical person would work a small patch of land to raise enough food for their family and be taxed to give a proportion of what they grew to the local landowner. The local landowner gaining their titles competitively, not all that dissimilar to how the modern politician achieves power! These landowner had at least some spare time and energy to develop new solutions to problems and thus society developed. Many of them were benign and often helped their serfs who hit difficulties

The industrial revolutions changed all that. A new breed of people with capital emerged who built factories in large towns and cities. and drew people from the land to work in these factories on the promise of a better life. It soon transpired that the city life of the newly emerging working classes was worse than when they had worked the land.

Modern capitalism came into being perhaps when it was realised that there is no point having an amazingly efficient mass production if there aren’t enough middle classes to buy the products. So the later 19th and 20th century saw new middle classes and decently payed working populations and the Western economies emerged and fast paced economic growth, where almost everyone’s quality of life improved. The typical wage grew as the overall economy grew, most of the time so everyone was happy. The capitalists were happy as their wealth grew faster than the working man.

After centuries of a system that increased the wealth of the capital class, which laso slowly gave the common man an improving living standard, In the UK all this changed, when Thatcher broke the social contract in the 1980s and particularly so after the financial crash of 2008 when the Tories brought in Austerity, to cut public services to deprive the social and economic life of the UK. Wages stagnated, what economic growth there was has gone entirely to the capitalist wealthy class. Things have got more expensive, and for the typical Briton the quality of life is in decline, something not expected in the 20th century.and against the bulk of human history in Britain. This is perhaps why there is a feeling of a need for change and to bring about that change requires reform of the democratic structures that have failed. There needs to be less capital and more money in the market, to ordinary people to spend on what they need, for liquidity or cash flowing around rapidly from person to person to provide market forces for the technological developments of the future, rather than the fat cats squeezing more out of the system that is shrinking. There needs to be less capital for capitalism to function.

The problem with this is that it sounds like old skool socialism. The barons of our times sneer and jive at the ‘socialist’ and focusing on the narrative of the failures of communist governments in the 20th century. The principle is not socialism, the principle is economic efficiency and getting the balance right. To get the balance right you need democracy so the decision maker has to be good decision maker and make decisions for the benefit of the community.

The other issue is that communities function well when there is a sense of belonging, that you feel that you are a valued member of a society. This inspires confidence and an outward looking attitude. So when you tend to agree with the government that governs your community, this fosters this sense of belonging. Surely in a democracy your views are going to chime with those of the government, because you voted for them, you had a say in the kind of ideas that shape your society.

However we have had a divide and rule Tory governments for all of my adult life. We are now loving with the consequences of that , a non-representative government, one that has failed to listen to people’s concerns with immigration.

When Brexit is discussed in the media you will often hear the phrase ‘The UKs position is…” or “the UK reaction is…”. Having learnt a second language, this looked like sloppy English, when they should be saying “The UK government says…”. However was it ever thus? If you look back to the mid 20th century and UK election history, from election to election you see massive swings between the Tories and the Labour party. When one party won big, it had consensus and support of a majority of the UK population behind them, a genuine mandate to govern. So even if you were in a minority, there was a sense of ‘ok, I’m in the minority on this, but my community has made a decision it’s my duty to go along with it’. This doesn’t happen anymore. The last few UK general elections have been hung parliaments, there is only a small difference in percentage support for both of the traditional big two parties. I remember a world where politicians of either side would try to argue the case for their position to bring across support from the ‘other side’. Times are now that politicians don’t even bother trying to argue, falling voter turnout had led to it being more important to fire up your natural supporters to vote than trying to persuade a new voter by argument. Trump being the epitome of this.

I am perhaps the product of this. I have never felt represented by a UK government. It’s not just being an odd ball outsider though. I have come to realise. It doesn’t have ot be this way, which is why I’ve always supported Welsh independence. i believe that an independent Welsh government would represent all the people of Wales, democracy can be re-built. The adage of ‘think global, act local’ comes to the fore, by having genuine democracy in Wales, it could then spread to the world.

The thing about belonging , when you find a community that you fit into, that you belong in, gives you a great strength and confidence. So when you are not afraid to encounter new or different things. It is this sense that has been neglected by UK government no longer being representative or leading by consensus. There is a general disconnect felt by the UK population towards the UK government. So as a people the Britons feel less confident, are a bit bothered that their doctor speaks a language they don’t speak, a sense of being alien in your own country. I know what they feels like from when I lived in Southern England and you do yearn for a sense of belonging.

It is possible this is the explanation of what Brexit is, for a return to investing in Britain once again. That Britain is gone, we need to build a new Britain and it is simply not possible to do that without reforming the constitution and democracy itself. We live in a diverse, changed world. We need new solutions to old problems.

There needs to be a raising of awareness of the need to constitutional reform, to increase local accountability away from centralised power structures. For awareness to grow that the cronies of the UK establishment are as bad if not worse than those of the EU. Then better decisions are able to be made by accountable decision makers, not career politicians. We can do all play our part by supporting things like Welsh independence. To get behind good local ideas and not moan about bad decisions made far far away. To not seek scapegoats , by race, religion, nationality or sexuality, but to acknowledge that we need to build things up and not tear other people down. That there are no easy catchphrases to solve our problems, but complicated analysis and rigourous debate to get to the answers we need. We need everyone to work on this building process. Brexit, leave or remain will not achieve this, we just need to create a new way of doing things.

Really Brexit is about nationalism. What complicates Brexit is that there are so many competing nationalisms at play, it is this which has made Brexit so confusing. A further problem with nationalism is that it often has negative connotations with racism. Historically nationalism has been associated as a creed of the dominant nation or race, blaming their ills on other groups of people.

Nationalism can be defined as simply as promoting the nation and defining the nation as the people within that nation. If that nation is defined geographically and include everyone withing that region then it can be a positive thing. Conversely where a dominant sub section of a geographical region claims neglect, such as white people within a culture, blaming another smaller people, then nationalism gets nasty. There is always a tendency for the rich and powerful to greedily seek more of the pie and thus the people or the nation suffer as their share of the pie is diminished. All politics is essentially nationalisms of groups demanding fair treatment.

Economic growth in the 20th century allowed most people’s slice of pie to get larger, so it didn’t matter so much if some people were getting larger increases in share of pie. However the current situation in the UK is that there is some economic growth, yet most people are getting poorer, whilst the very rich get richer without really contributing to the society. This means that the people (everyone not in the elite) see this as unfair and seek the interests of the masses/ the country to become more prominent. Democracy has failed, so more or at least a reform of democracy is required.

Brexit was often argued for in terms of taking back control, for more democratic accountability, to desire ‘my country back’. As such a mixture of Welsh, Scottish and English nationalisms. Largely older generations noticing that the UK state had declined and wished to reverse this process. But it is has been the Tory party and the neoliberal orthodoxy that has caused this decline, it’s simply gone unnoticed as it hasn’t suited the mass media to highlight long term trends or give them sufficient prominence.

Instead we have a British State nationalism of the British establishment clawing back powers from a centralised EU as conducted by the Tories. In a sense the establishment have effectively pitted the European nation against the British one, when there is no real conflict between the people of Britain and the peoples of the rest of Europe. For I am a member of both the European and British nations, it’s fighting amongst ourselves.

However Brexit never became a mass movement of the people of Britain, only of a dominant minority, as no-one has since argued for nationalism in geographic sense. Instead it seems the establishments Brexit has become dominant in the subsequent debate. So we have a situation where the people cry out for more power, but the establishment are using it for their own selfish ends. Really I expected the post Brexit era to be full of discussion of how to reform democracy across the UK. Instead the debate seems to be about how important is for the UK to negotiate a good trade deal with other states, say Mongolia which the EU had supposedly cruelly denied them, which I am sure was not to the forefront of the minds of those voting for Brexit.

Brexit nationalism became a negative force as instead of a focus on democracy, it has focused on scapegoating, of defining those groups who are to blame for everything as those who are not being British, specifically EU immigrants. Indeed most the EU migrants I know have stated that they feel a lot less comfortable in the UK these days, which is very sad.

The British establishment is very happy about all this division between the Brexiteers and the Remainers, as a culture of blaming other people detracts from a nationalism of reforming democracy, which is what should be happening. The people want change, but of people are kept fighting about what that change should be the establishment can carry on regardless.

Nationalism has become such a taboo word, yet really the political battle is between the nation (the people) and the state (establishment). The state has failed to serve the interests of the nation. The establishment tactic in this battle is to divide and rule, to pit nation against nation so the focus isn’t on the failed establishment but viewed as the fault of one group or another, such as the failings of the Brexit process being blamed on the Remainers or sub sections of Brexiteer opinion. In essence it is the establishment which is practising bad divisive nationalism, whilst many the various British nations seeks a positive nationalism for the good of all.

British nationalism, in the sense of the argument for a more democratic accountable UK, would be great. However I am a Welsh Nationalist, because what the British people need is to get away from tyranny of large minorities and a too powerful centralised establishment. Achieving a true democracy at a UK level is much harder to achieve directly. Bottom up democracy is I believe the way forward and once systems are in place in geographic nations, then cooperation across Britain and Europe can be re-built.

However it often seems that British Nationalists are arguing with Welsh nationalists, when both groups want the same thing, more democracy that registers their specific needs. The establishment is happy to encourage such infighting. For me nationalism isn’t about wrapping one flag around you, but is about gathering as many flags as you can to wrap around yourself to acknowledge how many nations we belong to, including the human nation, to include all people of all nations, to ensure nationalism doesn’t divide and lead to scapegoating of any minority group.

It can often seem very difficult to understand what Brexit is. Yet essentially to understand it requires the busting of a number of myths about Brexit.

Brexit has never been about a rational weighing up of the clearly identifiable negatives of EU membership to the UK economy against the benefits of membership. Neither is it simply a rejection of centralisation and diminished democracy, for that should have happened at the UK level a long time ago.

Politically, Brexit was bought about by the ‘Brexiteers’, the leadership of UKIP and many in the Tory party. The Brexiteers aim was to further the cause of laissez-faire capitalism, to free capital to make more money for itself to the benefit of those already with lots of capital. This can be viewed as simply the self-interest of those with capital, the leadership of UKIP and much of the Tory party.

Capital, or wealth is only one part of an economy. Capital with too much power diminishes an economy, capital alone does not make good decisions, it needs help. A free market is not one where capital calls all the shots. A true free market is where producers and consumers interact to produce a fair price for goods and services and what those goods and services are.

The aim of the Brexiteers has been to use their influence and control of the UK media to further their cause, to pass the blame for the decline of the living standards at the EU’s door, rather than the fault of laissez-faire capitalism itself. After all these neo-liberals have gained positions of power in the UK and have learnt how to manipulate the UK electorate.

The vast majority of the people who voted for Brexit, 52% of the UK electorate are not the people with large amounts of capital, who are greedy for more power and influence. The vast majority voted for entirely different reasons I believe. What most people want in life is perhaps essentially stability and the opportunity to improve things. This stability, or basis for growth consists of three essential things: Cultural stability, Economic stability and Community support. People in the UK are concerned about the decline of these things and the Brexiteers offered them hope for change, whilst the ‘Liberal Establishment’ mistook the issue of immigration being raised again and again ad nauseum to be closet racism, which it did indeed feed upon. The concern about immigration was not about race at all, but rather the issue of immigration was a proxy for the three fears:

Cultural Stability

People within a culture, naturally want to preserve their culture for the good things it provides. A culture can absorb new arrivals and over time the new members will be assimilated into the culture, or their children will. This is eased where there is a willingness to learn about and take part in the culture. However when the levels of immigration are high, the incomers can swamp the existing culture to the extent that it is possible to live in a different culture if those immigrants all come form a different culture. There are then fewer places for the existing culture to exist and the incoming culture can come to dominate. If you are a member of the native culture, you can feel to be an alien in your own home, you lose the ability to predict how your local society will react to events, you lose the cultural stability of your own culture.

This issue is well known about in Wales; there has been the decline of the Welsh language and it’s culture. I also experienced this growing up. My area of Mid Wales had increasing number of retired people moving in from outside Wales. It only became a problem when services and employment for young people declined, forcing the young to leave. This meant that Mid Wales now has the lowest economic productivity of all of Britain, largely because the population now has a very heavy post working age population and few young people to look after them and the loss of the local culture.

The centralised UK economic model has caused the young to move to seek work. The flexibility of the young displaces older people from their work and even their local area.

Economic Stability

People want to secure enough income to be financially secure, to be able to support their family and wider community. To have enough disposable income to be able to participate in the economy, to support worthwhile enterprises in their area, rather than scrape an existence using short-term solutions to make it to the next pay cheque. People also want there to be training and employment available locally for their children to become economically active and hence support them in their old age.

Young adults and immigrants moving to an area, are more flexible and able to tolerate the inconveniences of living in the most inconvenient part of an area. The young and immigrants are more able to take on job opportunities that the established population cannot as readily. The establishment population have cultural commitments and investments that restrict there ability to move and work longer hours. If the local economy is not growing, which is now the case across Britain, then emigration from your home becomes an option, giving you the chance to be the more flexible to out-compete a resident population somewhere else. It presents a tough choice between economic stability and cultural stability.

A lot of the fear of immigration is that the only major growth area of the UK is around London. So the jobs go to the young and other immigrants who are prepared to put up with the huge inconveniences of living in London [having to travel to do anything] and loss of the support of the home culture, rather than come to where there is ample Labour awaiting work, such as the Valleys communities in South Wales.

Community Support

The great thing about communities is that they have enabled humanity to move beyond subsistence farming, to pool skills and resources to create modern societies. In a declining economy people are concerned that there will not be a hospital bed for them if they become ill, that there will not be a good school place for their child. That should some disaster hit their family then the community will not be able rally around to help them overcome it as they are overburdened by struggle themselves.

Then there are immigrants, that they will place additional demand on social services. The Liberal economist will say that this doesn’t matter because as the population grows, there is proportionally more money for services and service levels can be maintained. However, this academic economist is talking about an ideal theoretical world. The current reality in Britain is that Social services, such as Schools and Hospital receive a lower and lower proportion of the nations money pot anyway. So, incomers will indeed put additional strain on services. Incomers also tend to require more from Social services as they haven’t built up the social capital of community support or cultural investment.

Racism

I don’t believe a lot of the racism that exists in the UK is not purely racist. Racism is prejudice towards people of a certain race. There is also prejudice towards people of different religion, hair colour, cultural background, religion, height and so on. People are people and to be prejudiced against someone for their race makes no sense, for what does it matter what colour a persons skin is.

A lot of racism is by proxy. People will see a decline in their cultural stability, economic stability or community support and when immigration levels are too high to their area this is noticed. Instead of laying the blame at the political for not investing to equalise opportunity everywhere, they will blame the immigrants. So when those immigrants happen to all be a particular race, that label sticks and over time does develop into genuine racism.

In the UK, immigrants tended to live in the poorest connected areas of cities, the most inconvenient places to live. Areas where the native population wished to leave if they could. So over time these areas became culturally dominated by certain groups, often becoming the dominant culture. It is absurd to expect a dominant culture to integrate to a minority culture without strong motivations for doing so. This was so much of twentieth century urban problems in Twentieth Century Britain. By that point racism from the native population already exists, which acts to pull the discrimated against communities together, reducing the strength of motivation to explore the native culture, which is now a journey away anyway.

But…

It doesn’t have to be like this. The Brexiteers can be stopped. We can start valuing our own cultures again, we can provide economic security to all and use that to encourage real economic growth. We can ensure our communities are supportive of all their members again, rather than a privileged few. The answer is the slogan the Brexiteers used under false pretences; Take Back Control. What we need is decisions made by the people for the people. Not to produce some socialist utopia, but to ensure that there is balance in all things, between Capital and Labour, so capital can be used to invest in things we all need, rather than used to make the majority poorer. Create balance between Public Services and Free Enterprise to maximise the economic efficiency of our communities. To ensure that every region can survive and thrive, because it has strong support networks, freeing peoples time and energy to pursue innovation and economic growth. To not allow things to become inefficient through centralisation of control . To spread wealth around, so everyone can use a small bit of the capital generated to support their own families and communities. To do this we need democracy and decision makers to be truly accountable to their communities, rather than an elite few. We need power to reside in communities, within areas like Wales, so we can grow and make our lives more secure year on year, to not allow any individual politician to cut themselves off from those communities, that is why we need independence in Wales and indeed we should apply the same principles everywhere. We should shift from laying the blame on people who are in some way different to us to those who made the decisions that caused our loss of culture, economic stability or community support and thus regain our freedom.

If we do something but can’t observe it’s consequences, we feel anxious. This sentence struck me as raising an important facet of anxiety, how it is about fear of the unknown. I have always been troubled by not knowing how other people react to my behaviour, partly because I’m aware that I am unusual, so can’t rely on how I would react as a reliable means of assessing the likely reaction of others. Overcoming anxiety is not overly worrying about how other people react, as long as what you are going is reasonable.

Of course, having largely overcome anxiety I am still sometimes anxious. So I still haven’t quite worked out what is normal everyday anxiety and what is overly worrying, but I just feel that I continue to make progress with this, knowing that a welded down definition is impossible.

The problem in the modern world is that we communicate far less face to face. Face to face communication is much easier because you can assess reactions straight away in real time and instantly modify behaviour. For example realising someone doesn’t want to discuss a particular subject at the moment. Sending a letter an e-mail or a text is difficult as you have no idea how people will react, you don’t know what mood they will be in when the message is received and it is difficult to express your intent without being overly wordy and often your meaning may be misinterpreted.

A good general strategy for for deciding when you shouldn’t be anxious about an action is to ask ‘What is the worst possible outcome?’. If this outcome is very unlikely, which you can usually assess, then you needn’t be anxious. Sometimes that worst possible outcome will happen, low probability events do happen from time to time. However, this doesn’t mean your action was wrong as the alternative is to do nothing, which often means sitting at home not engaging with the world.

I was incredibly unlucky in when I first overcame anxiety, the worst possible outcomes happened. I basically wanted to thank someone for helping me realise that I need not be anxious and the worst possible outcome was that they would be upset. So i was completely shocked when they did seem upset, it made no sense to me, because they didn’t reply and blocked me on social media, so to me they were upset. In my assessment that outcome seemed incredibly unlikely, yet it had happened. This confused me as i was unsure how careful I needed to be when communicating freely and honestly, as this suggested I needed to be incredible careful, even to the point where I shouldn’t initiate communication, ever. Years later I discovered that she wasn’t upset by my communicating, but rather that she had interpreted my being gushy and emotional as seeking a relationship, to black-mail them into being supportive, which was never the case. The fault seemed to be the everyday sexism of male attention to females that to them suggested that 99% of the time my communication would have been manipulative. These 1% unlikely outcomes seem to have a habit of cropping up when they are important, because it is the exceptional case anyway which people try to deal with using everyday assessments. As humans we are kind of programmed to see exceptional events as unlikely to be true. Yet it is only these rare events when people make great leap forwards.

This all suggests that anxiety assessments are about dealing with probability and in the real world we never have nice large data sets to play with to get towards the truth, we so often get one data point and have to ascertain if it is a rare event we have stumbled upon or is there somethign unknown to us (such as an aspect of what it is like to be a woman) that we have hit which is completely unrelated to our motive.

I grew up with an highly anxious mother and grandmother and I am also an only child. I became an adult with a much more limited understanding of regular social relations than the majority of people. So instead of naturally building up a database of social interactions to guide behaviour I had to observe the world as an outsider and try and build rule systems that seemed to work. So social interactions seem more like a game than living everyday life. The problem with rule systems is they are not good at exceptionalism and if there is a big factor that has not been included in the model, it can break down frequently until that factor has been quantified. There isn’t always time to study these down to root causes.

There are other areas where there are rule based solutions and more organic, interactive, transactional solutions, such as the simple act of crossing the road in the centres of large towns and cities at zebra crossings. In Britain where there are rules they are strict and if someone is standing by a zebra crossing or is close and looks like they wish to cross, cars must stop and wait until the crossing is finished. So a pedestrian doesn’t have to think they just cross and the cars must wait.

I was in Italy recently and I never looked up the rules, leading to a few anxious moments as the cars do not automatically stop for pedestrians. Nonetheless when walking across a zebra crossing, the cars will stop whilst you are blocking their lane. Sometimes they will toot their horn to suggest you have broken the unwritten rules.

After many crossings, it seemed to me that what Italy has a more social transnational system. If you wait for a gap in the traffic and then cross, cars happily stop. However if it’s busy and there are no gaps you can still cross, but get glared at. However when busy and you wait a few seconds to cross with a group of people the drivers seem happier. Basically, it’s a social and democratic system, everyone has the right to cross if you cause minimum disruption to others. The result is that traffic, both vehicular and pedestrian can move about smoothly, once the system is complex interactions is inherently understood. Such a system appeals to me a lot, that you can do whatever you want provided you try and cause minimal disruption to others. Nonetheless, if you have anxiety you do yearn a little for harder more precise rules.

In another European culture, Germany, it is much more rule based. On a pedestrian crossing where pedestrians have a a green and red ‘man’ signal, it is illegal and finable to cross when the red man is showing. What happens is that on a deserted road at night a pedestrian will wait until a green man signal, effectively wasting their own time to conform to the rule. In Britain, for contrast, we only follow this rule when it is busy, at other times we cross on red men signals. So, in Britain we only apply the strict rules to busy intersections but not universally like in Germany.

I think most people understand that perfection is impossible so there has to be a sliding scale of when rigid rules are obeyed and when not. For example we accept loud music of Friday and Saturday evenings, but expect things to be quieter during the week. Though there is no actual law covering this. However legally, anyone who official complains about noise has the courts on their side, whether the complaint is generally regarded as reasonable or not.

Culture is diverse, not only is our society made up of incomers from other cultures, but all sorts of different kinds of people with different attitudes to rules from within that culture. For example Italian culture is very rule based, but doesn’t seem so in a town centre where people race down narrow busy streets at night on their mopeds and the scenes can seem quite chaotic.

Social rules do seem better than strict laws, as laws are impossible to get absolutely right. However there are always those who will push the boundaries for personal advantage, and societies need mechanism for to ensure this code breaking doesn’t pay off to general detriment.

A visitor to a culture, such as myself in Italy, who doesn’t know the rules, in some circumstances can raise anxiety levels. Cultural rules, usually give some leeway to visitors because they don’t know the rules, and are not seeking advantage by not knowing them. However cultures tend not to give as much leeway to the anxious or otherwise different. If you don’t know the rules in your own culture you are looked down upon, despite not knowing all the rules isn’t your fault.

I have moved around a lot and broken many cultural rules I do feel a lot less anxious in Wales, as I understand the culture more deeply and am probably have less anxiety about throwing myself into foreign cultures than most people. At home i feel much less anxiety and comfortable, there are less unknowns. However, for work reasons, I have often lived away from my native culture and have to re-learn new subtle changes to the rules every time, to the point where I am less wary of not knowing the consequences of my actions as I know my understanding of these things is poorer anyway.

The other aspect of anxiety is fear of being judged by other people. I suppose I have become hardened to a lot of judgement as it isn’t relevant to me. Perhaps in reaction to that there are other areas where I care a lot more about being judged, yet learning that I am being judged because of the actions of others rather than my own actions just makes me feel less inclined to be bothered by others judgements of me.

Essentially what i am saying is that anything is fine as long as you can justify it to yourself as reasonable, or to a peer group. Yet, I am aware that this is quite a dangerous attitude as there is nothing but my own conscience or people who think in similar ways to me guiding my actions. And if in moving away from anxiety means that i spend less time thinking everything through so deeply then I will do bad things without realising it and be judged even more harshly than I ever used to worry about. This is the thing with living in a city, you never make much progress before there is another big road to cross.

This blog is perhaps a vehicle for my tirade against the world that almost everything exists as spectra, the world is not binary. Perhaps language itself is partly responsible for this and Brexit seems a good example of this.

Language is rarely precise, this is why we have poetry to be able to express ideas and that there is always more than one way of expressing the same thing. We use language as a kind of shorthand. We reduce long lengthy explanations to just a few words and expect that we will be understood. Indeed we often ask if our shorthand has been understood by adding an ‘isn’t it’ or something similar to the end of our sentences. We refer to things such as national characteristics, that we hope our audience may share an understanding of to enable higher level discussions. Complex discussions are only possible when the basic concepts are understood. Through this very process of creating shorthand, we often reduce complex nuances thoughts to a few words, thus creating binaries, it is or it isn’t to spectral ideas. The first words we lean are often Yes, no and not. Later we learn the much more complex vocabulary of quite, very and slightly. Sometimes, it is easy to forget that the binaries created in language are not real binaries.

The Brexit referendum was itself making the complex position of the UK in the EU into a simple for or against, to which many people wished to answer: ‘yes But…’ or ‘no But…’ often with very big buts. The issue of immigration is perhaps the biggest theme of the debate. Indeed, the meaning of the very word ‘immigration’ has subtly changed through the various debates. Whilst we know what immigration is, the movement of people into an area, the word has come to mean lots of different things to different people. In a sense this one word has lost it’s practical meaning in being a shorthand for a concept.

Even as a binary opionion, people are not for or against immigration, this is almost absurd. Most people are of the opinion that there should be less immigration into the UK. However how much less, what specific types of people are to be restricted is a huge complicated spectra. Yet, arguably Brexit won the vote when Nigel Farage said ‘the only way the UK can regulate immigration is by leaving the EU’, however exactly how this is to be achieved has not really been made clear, that;s the complicated bit and i would argue we don’t have the democratic structure to enable this to be implemented well. Lots of other things have to be sorted out for benefits to come about.

Yet, the issue of immigration in the UK is not even a simple ‘how much less?’ question as there is a whole spectra of arguments for why immigration should be reduced.

At one end of the spectra is the the cultural argument, that some people simply don’t like ‘too many’ people from different cultures living amongst the native population, for all sorts of reasons. This position is very close to racism, but not in itself racist. However racists will have this opinion. Indeed UKIP have used this argument to appeal to people with racist views, but cleverly hidden behind statements that are not in themselves racist. If you get the cultural argument and agree with it, it is simple to agree with this argument.

At the other end of this spectra is the economic argument: That a high net level of immigration is bad for the economy. The UK is economically unbalanced between the North and the South. The UK population doesn’t produce workers with the right skills, geographically where organisations require them. The UK economy found a work around to this in importing workers through immigration. The UK called out to the people of the British Empire to come and help rebuild Britain after the Second World war, so the UK now has significant populations from India and the Caribbean. These immigrants did suffer a lot of racism that we have made progress in moving on from that, these populations are now reasonably integrated into British society. However the more recent influxes from central Europe were to take jobs the resident population were unable to fill, rather than unwilling to fulfill. The argument is that it would simply be better if the UK arranged it’s economy so that it did produce the workers it required. We are now in the position where we have to import Doctors and Nurses as we don’t produce these skilled workers natively. We have a shortage of medical doctors in Mid-Wales which seems absurd as GPs are quite well paid. We don’t produce these workers naively because of the housing crisis, declining education standards and a declining healthcare system where doctors are over-worked. We are asking young people to go into a six figure debt to fund their own training, to do a job where they have to do a ten year induction before they achieve salaries that can re-pay their student debt, without mentioning, that during this 15 year period, we expect them to subsidise those who own property, save money for their own housing which is more expensive every year and somehow find the money to bring up their own children before they are too old. Is it any surprise that people do something else and leave these skilled jobs for immigrants who study somewhere where the cost of living is much less. There is the argument I heard during the Brexit campaign from people in areas with negligible immigration, people were concerned about immigration, because it meant jobs went elsewhere and didn’t come to their area (South Wales). This even applies to high earners, who refuse to accept offers of work from London as they can’t afford the housing costs there. London is harder to move to for a British person than it is to move abroad. The other part of this argument is that the failure of successive governments to provide housing , education and healthcare befitting a 1st world economy, has finally come to popular light and simply immigration, whilst papering over some systemic problems with the UK economy, puts additional pressure on housing, education and hospital places, which are still not being sorted out,., I would argue because of deficient democracy. This economic argument for reduced immigration is a lot more complex and nuanced than can be summed up in a single word ‘immigration’, so left an centre politicians struggle to communicate it effectively.

Essentially, it seems the population of the UK at large has woken up to the failures of the political consensus, or the establishment of the centre-right orthodoxy that has somehow held sway for the last thirty years. There is a widely felt understanding that the consensus was indeed wrong and has failed; as it was predicted thirty years ago that it would. However, there is no clear answer to the UK’s problems. There are two main forces seeking to implement their solutions, the liberal centre and the populist right. both of these groups with very different visions of what to do with Brexit, both groups share the frustration of never having been in political office to implement their visions. Largely because of the UKs binary democracy, that prevents non consensus ideas being implemented, and that the consensus view is itself a minority. Somehow the centre-right orhodoxy is still in power and not popularly opposed. The establishment is cleverly playing the two sides against each other to retain it’s own grip on power.

A serious Brexit government would be out there consulting widely, forging agreements and finding ways to make Brexit work for the UK economy. Instead they are arguing amongst themselves behind closed doors. Perhaps the idea is that all the division and dithering over Brexit will eventually mean that popular calls for Brexit are eventually dropped and the centre-right can continue as normal. This is frustrating the Brexiteers, who fear Brexit may never happen, but turning their ire against the centre-liberal ‘remoaners’, who never wanted this mess in the first place, it’s a distraction for us from the real work of making the UK economy stronger and a better place to live and work..

Which is all largely as I predicted. I was against Brexit, not out of love for the EU, but simply that the chances of making Brexit work well were tiny.What the UK needs more than anything is electoral reform, but this is challenging to argue for when there are so many other things going on. However , we need a system that enables the right decisions to be made and the current system proves again and again, that it is incapable of implementing the right solutions, or even basing it’s decisions on evidence based data.

If there is to be an alternative, the odds are stacked towards the populist right. Indeed as they were in the 1930s when the fascists were able to capture the popular imagination more than the communists, in Western Europe at least. Favoured, simply because the populist right can use the word ‘immigration’ as shorthand for their dislike of different people, whereas the liberal left have the much more complex, nuanced economic argument that will get lost in the clamour of what passes for debate in the main stream media these days. Essentially, it is a battle for whose meaning of a word becomes the consensus and it is much easier to do this with a simpler message, one that can be repeated often until people accept it. After all hate is simple, hope is more complex.

Maybe, the nature of language is at the heart of why political debates can be won with flawed arguments, through clever rhetoric. A symbol, a word, can be more powerful than a concept or a sentence. Such symbols have the power to change the world.